In software application testing, software applications are subject to several tests in order to examine how fast, durable, and reliable the tested software application is. Software application testing also ensures that memory consumption by the software application will not have a growing tendency while the application is being executed. When there is an unnecessary growing tendency of memory consumption by the software application, the situation may arise where there may be no free memory available for the software application, other applications, system resources, etc.
The growing tendency of memory consumption by a software application may be referred to as a memory leak. A memory leak occurs when a software application consumes memory but either does not, or is unable to, release the memory back to an operating system. A memory leak generally can only be diagnosed manually by a programmer with access to the program source code. Thus, determining when a software application has a memory leak can be very difficult, time consuming, and often inaccurate.